I Will Be Earth and You Be the Flower
by makeshiftpoet
Summary: This is my take on the way "Loving Annabelle" should have ended. Simone/Annabelle. F/f


I know this isn't anything closely related to Harry Potter, but I couldn't help myself. This was my take on the way the film _Loving Annabelle_ should have ended, just a relatively short scene that exemplifies fear and uncertainty and final waking from a fitful dream. There are lots of quoted pieces in it. The first are "The Letter" and "The Taxi" by Amy Lowell followed by "Love-Letter Burning" by Daniel Hall, then "Blues/for J.C." by Olga Broumas and "Waiting" by John Malcolm Brinnin. Obscure references, to be sure, but I thought they added a nice touch to the two literary ladies featured here. Also, in translation, the French means "I am afraid. I love her, but I love you, too. Help me."

I own nothing. This film is the work of Katherine Brooks, and the characters are hers.

I Will Be Earth; You Be the Flower

"Keeping Time"

This night so gently we circle the clock of streets. I hear your feet before we meet, I've come empty like this before. My mouth parched on "hello" fracturing me inside, my eyes blurring like sea glass at other faces you've shown.

So come with me again. What we call ourselves they have no names for, nor the peeled fruit offered between us.

And with lips round in even cadence, we shall recall this night so gently.

-- Melvin Dixon

Her eyes looked out from behind sepia colored lashes. Before her lay the Pacific Ocean, waiting, as it always seemed to be, for her to make up her mind. It seemed to speak to her as the waves licked at her dainty, pedicured toes: "Tell me what you want, within reason, Simone, and I will give you anything." She could have anything she wanted, anything at all, so long as it wasn't her, so long as it wasn't the strong, slightly boxy girl she had unexpectedly fallen for. Closing her eyes, she remembered the strength in tanned arms, nearly felt the caress of knowing fingers that were wise beyond their years. Biting her bottom lip and turning from the surf, she refused to meet the waves' measure. There were too many other things she desired to have that one taken away. Annabelle was in all of them.

Bare feet picking a path that led half in the wet sand and half without, Simone walked along the beach until she reached the spot where, nearly six months earlier, she dropped the cross that she carried so heavily with her. It would have rusted by now, she thought to herself as she looked down. But golden sunlight reaches all other yellow things, and despite the lump of dread that welled up into her stomach, she bent down anyway and scraped away the sand where she thought she saw something shimmer. There was the chain, and there was the cross. Neither had rusted. Neither had changed. They were still there, still impossibly linked to her broken heart and her shattered mind.

Fingers that once caressed the warm recesses of a young woman's body now caressed cold, smooth, straight-lined jewelry, and it was no riddle that this cross represented death, defeat, and finality. "I only ever thought about joining you. I guessed there would be hope for me if I stayed, but I only found myself moving further into despair until she woke me up, and now she's gone, too." She looked up into the red of a setting sun and smiled ruefully. "It's best, though, really. She's where she should be, and I'm here, left behind, waiting for something to wake me up again."

She turned and faced the ocean again, a slight breeze lifting and dropping her curly blonde hair. "Je suis apeurè. Je l'aime mais je t'aime aussi. Aidez-moi, Amanda." Her hand clenched against the chill of the cross in her hand, and as it molded into the creases of her palm, she felt it grow warmer. "But there's never an answer. I ask you to come away with me, and you shrink from my question. I call on your name in prison. . .prison, and I think you must hear, but you never came to comfort me. You leave me unfairly vulnerable, and I can't afford to wake up now. It hurts too much, to have had you and lost you, to have had her and lost her. I keep telling myself you're both dreams to me now, but I can't shake the reality from the dream, the sleep from the waking." She dropped her head and stared hard at the sand until black spots gathered around her periphery. And when the tears began to fall, she did not stop them. This strip of beach was her own, and in the fading September sunset, the beach was empty save her.

"I'm tired of being Sleeping Beauty," she said. "I'm tired of waiting for Princess Charming to come and kiss me from my slumber. I'm tired of chafing my heart," she started and bit back more tears, "against the want of you both." A sob bubbled up from her chest and threatened to come through, but something restrained her. A faint but perceptible shiver that announced, like a dinner bell, another's closeness ran down her spine.

"Of squeezing it into little inkdrops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon. Amy Lowell." She heard the voice, but she refused to turn around and acknowledge it, too afraid to turn around and find it was only her imagination. She bit her lip again, gripping the necklace tightly in her hand until the jutting arms of the cross jabbed uncomfortably the sensitive skin there. "You could be Snow White, then. Full of poison you never wished to ingest and never relinquishing your splendor even in death, your painted red lips awaiting the touch of your lover's." The throaty voice was there again, confident and beckoning.

"I'm not dark enough to be Snow White," Simone answered and closed her eyes. "I'm trying to say goodbye to you," she murmured. The last of the summer's sun fell sidelong on her face and illuminated, for a second, the darkness behind her eyelids.

"Personally, I always thought of you as Rapunzel. Golden hair, a means of escape, true love from a distance. It was too good to pass up the metaphor." Simone heard the smirk in her voice, and finally plucking up the courage to turn, saw before her the image of Annabelle.

"Ghost," Simone breathed.

"Hardly." Annabelle smiled, her green eyes catching the last rays of the sun as it finally dipped beneath the horizon and winked into the blue night of evening. The waves continued lapping up at them, and they drew from Simone a cry as she began to feel, for the first time in a long time, the grating pain of betrayal. "I'm here, and asking why should I leave you, to wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?" Annabelle took a step forward, her smaller but larger body moving soundlessly upon the sand. "I heard you saying goodbye, Simone, but it would help you more, I think, if you'd realize that the past will shed some light, but never keep us warm."

"Amy Lowell and… Daniel Hall?" Simone asked, barely daring to show what she still thought to be a fever-dream a small smile.

"Letting go, woman, is not as easy as pride or commitment to civilization would have us think," she replied and took a second step forward. Before her now were the familiar and far away autumn blue eyes, thin and crystalline, willing the younger girl to step again but not too close. Too close would shatter the dream too quickly.

"Olga Broumas," Simone answered, and Annabelle smiled. "Oh God, you're here," she said under her breath. "How did you find me?"

"That was the easy part. I knew where you'd go. The hard part was drumming up the poetry necessary for you to believe me. Living in a haze and tormented by the demons from your past, you would have gradually come to believe that the two women you loved would never return. What you forgot was that one of those women is gone, but the other is very much alive and willful. I saw the newspaper clipping and got directions from MapQuest. I blew off my mom's dinner party with the governor of Arkansas to find you." Simone laughed and in a breath, she had collapsed into Annabelle. Quick thinking on the younger woman's part saved them both from tumbling, but there was so much more than falling on their minds.

"You shouldn't be here," Simone breathed in Annabelle's ear. "You should be meeting women your own age and not troubling yourself with the musings of this old maid." Annabelle squeezed her tighter and breathed a loud sigh of frustration.

"I am where I should be," she said firmly, and Simone looked up into the green eyes full of conviction and of fearlessness, those qualities she wished she had, and she realized, suddenly and with no regret, that she had those qualities if she'd only accept as rightfully hers the love that came her way.

"Thus, in our published era, sweetness lives and keeps its reasons in a private room; as, in the hothouse, white hibiscus proves a gardener's thesis all the winter through, so does this tenderness of waiting bloom like tropics under glass, my dear, for you," Simone replied and smiled brightly.

"John Malcolm Brinnin," Annabelle smiled and, turning, drew Simone away towards the house where, in the morning, they would wake together without ever having slept. Behind them, glimmering on the sand, lay the necklace dropped and forgotten. An exceptionally high tide rolled in and washed it away into the reaches of the deep where dead memories go.


End file.
